IQNA

TEHRAN (IQNA) – Gary Emineth, a Republican candidate for US Senate in North Dakota, defended in a radio interview Friday sharing an image on Twitter that said no more mosques should be built in the United States.

Emineth, who is running in the GOP primary in hopes of challenging incumbent Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, appeared on the local North Dakota radio program Rob (re)Port show on WDAY AM970 and discussed a report CNN's KFile published Thursday that revealed that Emineth had shared several inflammatory posts on social media.

One of those posts was in 2016, when Emineth retweeted an image that called on users to "like and share" if they thought no more mosques should be built in America.

"If you look at the context of some of these posts, I just retweeted it. I never made a comment on it, right? And so the bottom line is, a lot of the radicalization that's turned on in the country and around the world has come out of these mosques," Emineth said.

"So I just made a statement, I'm a Christian that believes we ought to propagate our Christian faith. So I see an article and I retweet, 'no more mosques in America,' you know, and like, and share. So I retweeted it. So yeah. So what? I believe in Christian — I believe in liberties, freedom, free speech, and Christian values is kind of my base. And so yeah, I posted it, so no big deal. I'm not that stressed out over it."

Emineth later said that Muslims should "absolutely" be allowed to build mosques in the US, CNN reported.